Celebrity Economists Make Waves

Joseph Stiglitz, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of “The Price of Inequality”

Who are people turning to nowadays for business advice?

Celebrity economists.

Big-name experts on the economy like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Porter, Robert Reich and Muhammad Yunus feature prominently in a new ranking of influential business thinkers compiled for The Wall Street Journal.

The findings – based on Google hits, media mentions and academic citations – show just how much the business-guru landscape has changed since 2008, when a previous ranking was conducted using similar methodology. Author and consultant Gary Hamel ranked No. 1 at the time, a spot now occupied by Krugman.

“I call the new list the invasion of the celebrity economists,” says Tom Davenport a management professor at Babson College and author of the 2003 book, “What’s the Big Idea?”

Davenport, who compiled this year’s ranking with Jeffrey Cronin, a research librarian at HBS, says business and management topics have fallen out of favor, thanks to a shortage of megatrends like Six Sigma and business process re-engineering, which swept the nation in the 1980s and 1990s. “There’s no really big topic,” he says.

Meanwhile, the financial crisis has made economic insight valuable to businesses and consumers alike, he says. “People are casting about for what caused the crisis,” he says. That’s one of the reasons economists did so well in the rankings, he says.

To be sure, much has changed in recent years in the way gurus gain exposure. The new ranking, for example, doesn’t take into account Twitter followers, which might offer a modern measure of an individual’s influence. Twitter followers was not necessarily a good measure of a guru’s impact, says Davenport.

Davenport and Cronin separately calculated the number of Twitter followers and found that 20% of the top 50 gurus – most of them academics – still did not have accounts. The social media tool is still an “emerging trend” for many gurus, Davenport says. Bill Gates had the most Twitter followers at roughly 9.3 million (that has since jumped to nearly 12 million).

But at least one aspect of the ranking has not changed. Women thinkers, who were noticeably absent from the 2008 list, as the Journal noted at the time, are still largely missing from the newest results. In fact, investor and entrepreneur Esther Dyson is the only woman to make the top 50 this year.

Davenport says one reason may be because women tend to have more defined areas of expertise, whereas the men at the top of the list address broader topics.

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